What is the difference between historical fiction and history

To defend against this limitation, we need to learn to identify books in which the novelist skillfully blends historic information with literary art. Countering the need to engage young adults "quickly" in the historical narrative at hand is the genre's reliance on the accumulation of particulars that an author's research produces. Writers commonly invest enormous time and energy sifting through archives, reading books about the period, and visiting the sites where the action of the novel occurs.

This research goes far beyond learning about particular events. A careful historical novelist conveys a sense of the period through minuscule details about such matters as clothing, food, transportation, and social customs. It is just like Marianne Moore's famous prescription for the ideal poet. He must stock his imaginary garden with real toads". Yet too many toads can overrun the garden.

The very scope of an author's research poses a question of balance. How does an author keep a narrative moving but also communicate the information necessary to bring the period alive? Many writers admit that having done the research, there is a real temptation to use too much of it, and reviewers are sharply critical when they perceive the imaginative content of the story being submerged in historical facts, an imbalance, for example, that Hazel Rochman addresses in her review of Katherine Lasky's Beyond the Burning Time, saying, "The history overwhelms the fiction, although both are compelling".

However an author chooses to balance her material between history and fiction, accuracy remains a primary obligation of all historical fiction. There is no margin for errors or anachronisms, each of which can reduce a novel's usefulness or interest. No successful writer of historical fiction takes this matter lightly. Writers who work in the genre tell stories of their own inadvertent lapses.

Author Geoffrey Trease opened his Mist over Athelney , set in ninth-century England, with a scene in which the characters sit down for a dinner of rabbit stew. Only after the novel was published did an eleven-year-old reader spot a problem: There were no rabbits in England at that time Usually a copy editor catches and corrects these kinds of errors, but not always.

Kathryn Lasky was tripped up when she allowed a character in Beyond the Burning Time , her seventeenth-century novel about the Salem witchcraft trials, to carry a kerosene lantern. Kerosene lamps, though, were not used until the nineteenth century. She accounts for this slip with an autobiographical detail: "I was writing the novel up in our summer place in Maine," she says, "where we have kerosene lamps, and I'm always worried that the kids could set the house on fire.

So, even though my characters used candles in other scenes, I had kerosene on the brain when I wrote" telephone interview, August, Strict adherence to historical accuracy can pose a problem if "accuracy" involves brutal or immoral behavior. What are the writer's option when the intended readers are young adults, an audience for whom some readers may desire a subdued version of historic events?

Kathryn Lasky has encountered this problem with two historical novels of the old West. The first, Beyond the Divide , follows a wagon train West. In telling the story of Meribah Simon, who accompanies her father on the journey, the novel demonstrates how the pernicious greed for gold so corrupted many of the emigrants that they robbed and killed each other.

The appalling toll of the Westward Movement not only on Native Americans but emigrants as well is clearly a major theme.

Some reviewers, though, balked at the portrayal of mythic American pioneers as thieves and murderers. Dorothy Lettus wrote, in Voice of Youth Advocates , "It is not appealing to read about mean, sordid characters like those who people this book" In one novel, a young girl raped by outlaws is viewed as the guilty party and then shunned by most adults in the wagon train.

When a reader protested such a response, wanting a more sympathetic reaction, Lasky defended the historical accuracy of the episode. There were no rape crisis centers back then" personal interview, October, , Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lasky aroused similar criticism when she opened her novel The Bone Wars , set in the nineteenth-century Old West, with a violent episode. Wrote Zena Sutherland , "Why the book begins with a scene in which five-year-old Thad is under a bed in which his mother, a prostitute, is being murdered by a brutal customer is not made clear". Despite this fact, we prefer to think of them as school marms. Isn't that the nice, innocuous profession of all women?

Well, guess what? The dynamic nature of language poses another problem of accuracy. Vocabularies change from one historical period to another as new words slip into common usage and others become archaic.

These transformations impose certain restrictions on dialogue, and writers of historical fiction cannot give their imagination entirely free reign in creating it. The language must not only ring true to the character speaking it but must also correspond to the vocabulary of the period. When a writer chooses a first-person narrator, the issue of language becomes even more critical. A narrator whose voice relies too heavily on outdated language, however historically correct, is sure to lose readers.

On the other hand, a narrator's vocabulary, like the dialogue for all characters in historical fiction, must be restricted to language in use at the time of the story. Writers John and Patricia Beatty tell of finishing their novel Campion Towers , set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of , when they began to suspect that their young first-person narrator was using some language that didn't exist in the s.

Although they had carefully researched the period, they now edited their manuscript to trace the history of any questionable words. Their work validated their suspicions: they had to find substitutes for such terms as "mob," "aisle," "amazing," "bewildering," "chunk," "clunk," "carefree," and "complete".

If the first-person narration is cast as a diary, additional constraints are called into play, as author Joan Blos discovered when she decided to write, A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal , in this form in She read several authentic diaries in preparation for writing the fictional one, learning that her choice imposed very particular limitations : "For example, dialogue would have to be used sparingly, as diarists tended to report the fact of a conversation, not its word-for-word content.

Description would have to be limited to situations, objects, and persons of particular interest to the protagonists herself". Of course, dialogue and description are two key element in bringing any fiction alive, so the diary form was severely limiting. However, she stuck with it because, she says, it allowed her to be faithful to New England sensibilities that were conventionally suppressed by understatement without boring or disappointing twentieth-century readers accustomed to books whose protagonists announce their feelings clearly.

Closely related to language accuracy is the problem of narrative voice, shaped not only by word choice but by the narrator's opinions and attitudes. These, of course, are filtered through the author's contemporary sensibilities. He referred to his research. I referred to my research. I suggested that the demands of history and fiction are slightly different — that since a novel is a story, it must be complete, and since a history must be accepted by the reader as accurate, it must be incomplete.

He was not convinced. He kept talking, I subsided, the programme ended, but he did have the last word apart from the host — he and the other historian agreed that the historical novel — even War and Peace — was a secondary form, at least compared with what they were doing. If it makes no sense, then readers will not read it. A history book is, therefore, a construct.

Because of archaeology, because of archives, because of historians, we live in an age where historical novels as a form are having a bit of a boom. Keepers from my Collection of Historical Fiction. Historical Fiction vs. History and historical fiction are necessarily not the same thing. The purpose of history is to narrate events as accurately as one can.

The purpose of historical fiction is to enable a reader through the perspective of characters in the story to feel that she or he is present at the events. Such a goal obviously requires some modification of the events. About Me.

I completely agree with what you say about how the historian uses speculation to bridge facts and how the novelist uses the imagination to create a story which links all the facts.

I love historical fiction as long as they do not try to label it as a fact. I think the best thing historical fiction does is getting rid of historical gender biased nonsense by giving a voice to the woman, or using a commoner view point to re-exam historical events I'm not going to give names. I think learning about history will be pretty dull if we didn't have this genre. I also agree with Chantelle who's also a teacher! For example, we use a lot of literary material in teaching English and kids always love fiction work than non-fiction.

Recently I used an extract from Dumas' The Three Musketeers, and they loved it so much, with in a week of self research, they learned the historical events of the affair of the queen's diamonds, and the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham.

Feb 11, PM. Often - after I have read a fictional work - I have gone on to explore the "factual" world from which the story and events have taken place. Sometimes, the facts are just as intriguing as the fiction. Feb 13, AM. I think people can absolutely learn history from historical novels, maybe better than from history books, which, as you said, are all slanted, anyway. Who is it who said history is written by the victors? I'm reading The Princes of Ireland currently, and it reads like half fiction and half non-fiction in its approach.

Interesting technique. It makes me think Edward Rutherford is a historian who puts his knowledge into fiction more than a novelist who researches history for his books. Between him and Frank Delaney, I do feel I have a good grasp of ancient Irish and surrounding history.

Authors are seen as experts of sorts. We authors need to remember that. Feb 27, PM. Enjoyable discussion.

As a writer I think is a privilege for me to read the non-fiction books I use for my research. But then it is my job to try to get inside the minds of the time and imagine a life beyond the facts but springing from them.

This is what hooks the reader,what is not in the text books - the imaginary view from a characters eyes. Mar 05, AM. Apr 04, AM. Speaking from experience as a non-lover of history classes, I started off slowly with historical fiction and am now a full-on history lover.

I devour history books; I started with familiar eras such as Tudor England, all the more familiar thanks to Ms. I have a whole bookshelf of non-fiction history and biography that I'm sure never would have materialised were it not for historical fiction.